In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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07 Apr

As the Washington Post notes, the Obama administration has authorized the CIA to assassinate Aulaqi wherever he is found.  It is very unlikely that CIA agents qualify as lawful combatants -- they don't distinguish themselves from the civilian population, they don't carry their arms openly, etc.  So, let's assume that CIA agents manage to kill Aulaqi in Afghanistan.  I assume...

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07 Apr

The American Society of International Law recently awarded its annual certificates and prizes for scholarship in international law.  A number of the winners have either been involved in OJ symposia or are friends of the blog, so I want to acknowledge their achievements here: Certificate of Merit in a specialized area of international law: Mark Osiel, "The End of Reciprocity: Terror,...

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06 Apr

Walter Russell Mead has an illuminating post on the liberal internationalist tendencies of the Obama Administration.  Putting aside whether or not liberal internationalism is, as Mead puts it, "a strategic mistake that leads a lot of people inside the administration and well beyond it to make consistently bad decisions about American foreign policy.", I find his post fascinating for its classification of different approaches...

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06 Apr

"An ancient gold tablet, discovered during archaeological excavations in 1913 in the Ottoman Empire, disappeared from a Berlin museum in the immediate aftermath of World War II and reappeared almost sixty years later in the safe deposit box of a Holocaust survivor." So begins In re Flamenbaum, a case that reads like a Hollywood movie script. As reported here, "the...

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06 Apr

I figure it's never too late to catch up on some of last week's April 1 reporting.  The Harvard Law Record got a great "scoop" with this story: Speaking to a lunch seminar held by the National Security Law Association, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was shocked to discover that the term “self-executing”...

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06 Apr

So, it turns out that the US military was lying through its teeth when it claimed that the three Afghan women murdered during a "bungled" Special Operations attack in Afghanistan six weeks ago were not killed by NATO -- read: American -- forces: NATO military officials had already admitted killing two innocent civilians — a district prosecutor and local police...

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06 Apr

It's not exactly a hot topic, even among international lawyers, yet the ongoing dispute over the Western Sahara (and Morocco's claim to it) has drawn the attention of 54 U.S. Senators, who recently sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Clinton about it favoring support for Morocco's 2007 proposal for autonomy in the disputed region. This analysis claims the...

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04 Apr

Happy Easter, everyone!  I recognize this is a bit of an unpleasant topic to bring up on a holy day, but it is worth noting that the rumblings about litigation against the Vatican and the Pope over the various child-sex-abuse scandals continue.  Lawyers in the UK are actively researching how and whether to bring legal action during the Pope's upcoming...

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